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A Guide to Effective Business Communications

(this text appears as Chapter 2: The People/Technology Vision in the book)

The People/Technology Vision

Introduction

In this chapter, we will cover:

Why we need to consider people when making technology decisions.

How the available technology affects our working lives.

Why choosing a communications solution requires real vision.

Where to start?

Communications technologies exist in order to help people to interact with each other, to learn and to share ideas, and to record information for later use.

There are three things every organisation needs to think about when setting a communications policy, or procuring a solution. Firstly, the People and what they need. Secondly, what Technology is available at the right price. And lastly, what is the Vision for the future of the organisation – and how could technology help achieve it?

People and Technology are at the heart of communications systems, hence the vision for how to make most effective use of both lies at the heart of this book.

People

Organisations have a finite number of people, some more effective than others for a whole variety of reasons. I can find no dictionary definition that warrants the term ‘resource’ to describe people, and I think that it’s a mistake to make any comparison, intentional or not, between people and commodity items used in running a business.

Stripped down, an organisation consists of some intellectual property (products; ideas), some assets (buildings; inventory; equipment) and some people. The intellectual property and assets may have quite clearly defined monetary value, but what about the people? Determining and appreciating the value of individuals is a real challenge – and one we’ll visit throughout this book.

There is a major problem with people: we have inefficient interfaces! It can sometimes take hours of conversation to pull out a single page of salient points on any given topic. We can only communicate with the outside world through words – or, more rarely, in art (computers aren’t so good with art so I suggest we stick to using words in the business world). All of this disguises the amazing things that go on inside our minds, and hides the true value of each of us, as individuals, to the people around us.

In effect, people are information silos and we need to work hard to connect those silos together. It’s really easy for each person to work in a little bubble, deciding when and where to connect their silo to that of their colleagues. I believe we can improve effectiveness by making connected the default state. So instead of each individual hoarding their own data – meeting notes, emails, documents – everything should go down into a shared electronic system and be made available as appropriate to colleagues, customers, vendors or indeed to the big wide world.

When people get together, they can achieve great things: but getting great things to emerge consistently and continually from any group is a huge challenge.

Shared knowledge and experience may be priceless, but people are mobile and move around and between organisations. They leave. They die. So not only do we need people to work together effectively, we also need to extract from them those essential bits of knowledge that we need to keep hold of for other team members now and in the future.

So the People part of our communications plan has to cover identifying what knowledge and ideas lie in the minds of the people in our organisation, a means to extract and store that information, and a means to use that stored information on a daily basis to make our organisation work. Traditionally the solution to this problem has been email and reports, but we can do a lot better than that!

This is at the heart of what social media is all about, but I’m not suggesting we all need a twitter feed directly from our minds to each of our colleagues. Getting information out of our minds and into a shared space is one part of the solution, the second is perhaps harder: making use of that information once it’s been put there. That’s really where the technology becomes critical.

Technology

Computers are really good at handling huge amounts of data.

A great way to make use of computers, then, is to get them to analyse data and provide it back to us in a condensed, targeted fashion. By putting as much information as possible into their data banks, we can maximise the benefit of the information they churn out.

For instance, we get an inbox full of email every day – a stream of unsorted information which we have to sort through ourselves. When we subscribe to data feeds from RSS sources such as newspapers, from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the like, we similarly get a pile of unsorted information. Although these feeds are the result of manual selection in the first place, that doesn’t mean it’s all of value to us – and it certainly doesn’t mean that the rest of the information available, the feeds we haven’t selected, are of no interest.

Why can’t we get, instead, a stream of information, individually tailored, automatically identified for us from all available sources?

These are areas we’ll explore further later on in the book. But let’s take a step back. To understand why communications systems are now of such fundamental importance, why buying decisions require a book, it’s useful to look at a little history.

The telegraph – made practical by Samuel Morse and first used in the field in 1844 – was the start of a communications revolution, bringing everything from major news to personal messages to all corners of the globe. To us now it seems archaic, but to users of the time it must have quickly become an essential part of their modern world. Before that the choices of mounted messengers, semaphore, smoke and fire were each prone to problems over any significant distance.

When the telephone came along in 1876, courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell, it was eventually to provide the ubiquitous voice communications that we have today. Being able to speak to someone else, almost anywhere, is still an essential part of the communications toolkit.

It took almost a hundred years to evolve to the next major stage: the internet. Because we make so much use of it today, in products from desktop to mobile, it’s easy to forget that it only emerged, with the standardisation of TCP/IP, in 1982 – and only became commercial in the late 1980s. It seems to be everywhere, yet according to the ITU 61% of the world’s population were not users in 2013.

Our world has evolved radically since the days before the telegraph. We expect to be able to travel globally with relative ease and comfort, and certainly think nothing of commuting to work over distances which would have been unimaginable even 50 years ago (in 2009, according to the UK Department of Transport , the average distance men commuted in Britain was around 10 miles each way – sorry it’s not me being sexist, it’s them).

But as we’ll see throughout this book, communications technologies are starting to provide a different solution to the travel headache. The travel problem and the issue of inefficient ‘human interfaces’ can be solved with one set of tools.
Technology has always been a contributor to the success or failure of ventures, but in the past this has been about buying the right machinery to make products and developing the right products to sell. The thing that is different now is that much of our ‘product’ comes out of offices, where the machinery used for production is software. And whilst machinery used in manufacturing evolves at a relatively slow rate, software can evolve on a monthly basis.

Modern communications systems use software and general-purpose computers. Bespoke telephony hardware can still be bought but, although the device on your desk may look very little different from a model from a few years ago, the chances are it is connected via a LAN to a communications server rather than via dedicated wires to a telephony switch. Or if it isn’t, then it certainly will be within a very few years.

But this approach no longer works, because we’ve gone beyond simple voice systems. The communications environment has to be integrated not monolithic: it must cover phones, yes, but also video telephony, voice/video messaging, delivery of training videos, database systems, email, instant messaging, social media and every other aspect of the spaghetti which we will be unravelling in this book.

To create a technical solution which will give the best possible business results, you will need to understand what your organisation requires as well as what is available to you. You will certainly need to adapt a solution for your people, but you may also need to work on adapting the people to your solution. Once implemented, the system should be reviewed constantly, taking on board all user feedback, and updated regularly in order to continue to achieve the results you want. Your communications platform is a living creature, and what you buy today forms the DNA which you will evolve with your business, so it’s important to buy based on a vision of how it can evolve in line with your needs and the needs of the world around you.

Vision

Now is a great place to be, because we can know everything about it if we look hard enough. The future is not so easy. The future is guesswork. So what can we consider in order to try to lead our organisation to success in the future?

Creation of any vision always starts with a simple question: What do we want to achieve? It isn’t enough to simply look at the current or imminent needs of the organisation, and create or procure a solution to meet those needs. Just as any successful organisation will have a plan for its future stretching at least for the next 5 years, it also must have a matching communications vision of a similar duration.

This is a real challenge, but without a vision of how interaction within your organisation, with your suppliers, and with your customers might change – how you want it to change – over the next few years, any choices you make now could end up being expensive mistakes.

If you are investing in communications equipment or solutions, or if you are forming a communications policy for your organisation, then you need to understand how the landscape is changing. If you are content to buy the cheapest and simplest solution, and do not wish to explore how to evolve communications in your business, then you probably don't need to read any further. Want to do better than that, though? Read on!

Making sensible buying decisions now, based upon an understanding of your communications needs and a vision for the future, will benefit your business in the medium and long term.

Summary

People have inefficient interfaces, but great minds. We need to help those great minds do their work.

It’s only about 30 years since the internet was born. Most communications innovation is less than 10 years old, but the rate of change is frenetic and staying in the old world is not an option.

Communication solutions are no longer monolithic: they are complex integrated solutions.

Buying decisions made now must be based upon current and future communications needs, in line with your company’s business vision.

You can read 'Chapter 2: The office', and of course the rest of the book, by getting either the print or electronic version from Amazon or from your local bookseller.